The Retailer’s Guide to Marketing Resilience: 10 Challenges — and How to Solve Them, Part 2
6/22/2026
In part one of this two-part blog, we examined five leading challenges that retailers face today and actionable solutions for each. Here, in part two, we’ll dive into five additional challenges that retailers are faced with and again provide actionable solutions. Plus, we’ll again showcase brands we’ve worked with who’ve successfully implemented those solutions.
6. Capturing data on the sales floor
If in-store associates won’t ask for, collect, and report customer information, your marketing engine will starve. You have to convince your sales force that they’re integral to driving the store’s business.
The solution: Internal alignment and communication can make for a better customer experience and drive sales. Informed teams, shared goals, staff training, and continuous feedback on what works (and what does not) in-store can all contribute to an organization’s success. Good CRM data can be the key to success, particularly with high-value purchases
The impact: A regional home improvement store improved their data capture from 50% to nearly 80% over three years by focusing on alignment and relationship building with the store’s associates.
7. Navigating uncontrollable variables
For highly seasonal product retailers, uncontrollable variables like the weather can ruin your marketing plans by delaying, fast-forwarding, or otherwise condensing the seasons.
The solution: Agile response teams, measuring campaigns in real time, can allow you to quickly pivot campaigns. When primary categories aren’t connecting due to external variables, you can swiftly switch to secondary and tertiary categories. Beyond the weather, retailers also face such uncontrollable variables as economic fluctuations, supply chain volatility, governmental regulations, competitor actions, and shifts in technology.
The impact: During a bad weather season, a regional farm supply chain leaned into Google Shopping data to discover that hardware and automotive categories were delivering the highest ROAS, shoring up weakness in their normally primary categories.
8. Ensuring C-suite alignment and collaboration
Too often, the marketing budget can look like a massive expense on the P&L. So, it's critical to collaborate across the C-suite to make sure that everyone is aligned and understands how marketing investments drive corporate goals — otherwise, your budget will constantly be under threat.
The solution: New vocabulary and education. Stop talking just about ROAS. Broaden the conversation to be about return on marketing investment. In the process, initiate education at the C-suite level about what metrics and outcomes best demonstrate progress toward shared goals. Shift the focus to marketing’s contribution to the organization’s long-term success and how marketing can improve revenue generation.
The impact: A national mobile phone retailer invested in a two-hour marketing deep dive with the CFO, demonstrating how marketing investment results in bottom-line returns. This in-depth educational effort made it possible to secure significant budget increases and devise a more open line of communication with the C-suite.
9. Overcoming single-touch attribution
Proving the value of high-funnel media like display ads can be difficult — particularly when executives are hyper-focused on single-view attribution.
The solution: Multi-touch attribution (MTA) and media mix modeling can paint the full picture of a customer’s journey. Capable of mapping out complex, sometimes non-linear paths to purchase across different devices and platforms, MTA and MMM help avoid bias and assist in identifying which channels are worth investing in.
The impact: A regional home improvement retailer was able to utilize MTA to prove that nearly one-third of their customer segments engaged with upper-funnel touch points throughout the path to purchase. The process helped the retailer validate their continued investment in display ads.
10. Developing the people and technology to manage all of this
Retailers waste a substantial amount of time and money trying to build out massive data teams and infrastructure, all in an attempt to generate incremental savings.
The solution: You don’t have to build and execute everything yourself. Instead, lean on partners who have a deep bench of expertise, technology, and options. Source a partner capable of offering immediate access to pre-built, tested, and mature technology platforms, eliminating the need for a lengthy development cycle. Your internal resources should be focused on customer-relationship strategy and decision making — let external partners handle complex, execution-heavy tasks.
The impact: Retailers have found that they can outsource complex tasks, yielding faster, more sophisticated marketing machines without having to over-hire, over-invest, or wait for something new to be built.
Read part one of The Retailer’s Guide to Marketing Resilience: 10 Challenges — and How to Solve Them here.
Iridio℠ by RRD simplifies marketing complexity by unifying creative, media, and data and analytics in one platform. As a trusted marketing partner to top brands in retail, healthcare, financial services, and other industries, Iridio's data-driven solutions connect brands with their audiences at defining moments.